


the sound of water falling over stone

by TheLionInMyBed



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/F, I feel I ought to add more tags, Pool Sex, but that's it, that's the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 22:45:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10751337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: “There is more than one way of living as there are many ways to die. I sometimes think it would do the Eldar well to remember that.”Lúthien lives. Galadriel comes along for the ride.





	the sound of water falling over stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LiveOakWithMoss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveOakWithMoss/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Sorceress’ Apprentice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10388733) by [LiveOakWithMoss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveOakWithMoss/pseuds/LiveOakWithMoss). 



> The happiest of birthdays to my absolute favourite month, my partner in crime, my beloved smutdragon. It is an honour to be your friend and I eagerly await the day I come live in your garage and never leave xxx
> 
> When June wrote the excellent [The Sorceress' Apprentice](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10388733), the scene with Galadriel and Lúthien was my faaavourite for all the elegant musing on elven approaches to mortality, the striking contrast between two clever and powerful young women and, if I'm honest, their great chemistry. Sooooo....here's them fucking!

 

Lúthien loved her father dearly and so she would never say outright that she found his obsession with death to be maudlin and self indulgent.

She might imply as much, though, to a pretty Noldo girl with golden hair and hungry eyes.

For a woman who had been - as her father would put it - so very stained by death, Galadriel was as _alive_ as anyone Lúthien had ever known. Alive like the sly eyed wildcats that haunted the forests above Menegroth, the very bravest of which - or the most desperate - would stalk her mother’s birds.

It fascinated her. Was it Aman that had kindled that fierce light in her? Or had it come later, at Alqualondë or on the long march across the Ice?

It would be unthinkably rude to ask, and so Lúthien did not ask. Instead she found Galadriel in a great pillared hall of beeches, took her arm and asked her to come swimming.

“I know a pool,” she said. “Blue as midnight and just as deep, but my father hates it when I go alone.”

“I’m sure Daeron would come if you asked him,” said Galadriel, a coy smile playing upon her lips. “And Elu Thingol might prefer his company to mine.”

“Then let him play for my father. You and I are for the deep woods and dark waters,” said Lúthien and leapt away, toes sinking not at all into the mossy carpet, and Galadriel laughed and came racing after her.

Lúthien knew the woods and knew the way and knew her feet were light, but Galadriel was tall, taller than most men, and did so hate to lose. She ran with her skirts hitched up and tucked into her girdle, legs deer-dappled with light, breath puffing between white teeth. Lúthien was ahead when they broke from the trees into the clearing, but Galadriel fell upon her, snatched her up and lifted her off her feet.

Toes catching for purchase on the air, Lúthien laughed and writhed about to face her, pecked a kiss onto the tip of her nose and slipped free of her grip when it slackened in surprise. She slipped free of her mantle too, letting it pool about her feet as Galadriel watched, grey eyes cat-wary, oh so careful of her pride.

Lúthien knew herself to be as lithe and lissome limbed as ever Daeron had extemporised in verse, but poetry was less flattering than the faint prick of a blush upon Galadriel’s cheeks.

The pool was at her back, a lip of slippery stone and a sliver river of a brook spilling down into the basin below them. It was not so far to fall - her own height thrice over - but the rocks were sharp, the water cold, and even in Doriath, within her mother’s wards, death could still snatch them up.

Not letting her eyes leave the other woman’s face, Lúthien smiled and spread her arms and let herself fall backwards.

It was a dive she’d made a hundred times before, a hundred thousand. The breathless drop, two heartbeats and a lifetime long, and then the crash of water closing over her, snatching her down, _down_ into its heart. Silence, darkness, and then back again, into the light and air.

The water was so cold it stole the breath from her, pricked her all over with gooseflesh, and turned her fingers a delicate lavender. She laughed at the shock of it and shook her head so that the bells in her ears tinkled like the splash of the waterfall.

Still stood upon the cliff, Galadriel looked down at her as Lúthien waved and brushed wet hair out of her face. Cold would be harder on a woman who had crossed the Ice, but Galadriel was strong and sharp as the tempered steel her people prized, albeit just as brittle.

She stepped back from the edge, vanishing from Lúthien’s sight. Half a moment’s wondering if she’d been abandoned and then there came the rustle of cloth, the pound of running feet upon the earth, and Galadriel leapt from the ledge. She was the daughter of the swan-maiden of Alqualondë and Lúthien, who was well familiar with swans and the consequences of angering them, had to agree that there was something very swanlike in her plunge. Galadriel did not choose to dive gracefully but clutched her knees to her chest and hit the water with the force of a dropped stone.

The crystal spray of water that erupted went straight up Lúthien’s nose, and she coughed and shrieked and splashed Galadriel back as soon as she’d surfaced with a smug look upon her face.

“Wretch,” said Lúthien, when she was done gasping. “O foolish wretch. Not lightly does one so insult a Princess of Doriath in the heart of her power.” She splashed Galadriel again and then tried to duck her under.

Daughter of Elu Thingol that she was, Lúthien stood tall, but Galadriel was taller still and more strongly build besides. The spat ended, as anyone with an ounce of foresight might have told, with an unsatisfying lack of revenge and even more water up Lúthien’s nose.

“I knew I should have asked Daeron,” she said pettily, treading water.

Galadriel, trying and failing badly not to look smug, lay back so that her hair spread out around her, thick as Uinen’s but far brighter. “They say,” said she, “that the first sound that was heard by the Elves was the sound of water falling over stone. They say that in its depths, the Music of the Ainur echos yet. It is well you did not ask him; you’d never be able to hear any of it over the wittering about nightingales.” Only her face was visible above the water’s mirrored surface, and the tips of her toes and the tips of her breasts, the nipples peaked by cold.

Lúthien looked at her and shivered, teeth aching in a way that had not the slightest thing to do with the chill water. She had watched Galadriel blush over her tapestries at the very mention of her mother’s name, knew she had begged twice for tutelage. If Lúthien was any judge then Galadriel would not be long put off refusal and nor did Lúthien think her mother truly wished her put off. But what came of that would come. For now, there was the water and them and nothing else.

“I’m cold,” she said. “Come lie upon the bank with me.”

Galadriel huffed and rolled her eyes but swam - smooth, lazy strokes which made her Teler heritage quite clear - to the shore and hauled herself out upon the rocks, offering a hand down to Lúthien. Her fingers were icy and she was shivering the hardest of the two of them but her teeth were clenched against the chattering while Lúthien’s rattled freely in her head.

The rocks were rough beneath Lúthien’s buttocks but too sun-warmed for her to object. Beside her, pressed together shoulder to hip, Galadriel’s skin was seal-sleek but unpleasantly clammy.

“Warm me,” said Lúthien and slid closer.

Not ‘let me warm you,’ and she knew that she’d judged right when Galadriel turned to her, blue lipped but bright eyed. Water had darkened her hair but not stolen the shine from it and it fell in wet ropes about her shoulders to tangle on the ground with Lúthien’s, black and gold. Beneath the clean scent of the pool and the richness of wet loam, Galadriel smelt delicious and alive, and faintly of garlic from their luncheon.

Galadriel was as fierce as Lúthien had ever dreamt, tongue plunging deep into her mouth, as her hands tangled in Lúthien’s hair to hold her still. She had cold lips but kissing brought heat to sluggish blood and left them warm and flushed and swollen.

Lúthien’s own blood thrummed in her ears as she lowered her head to lick down that long, fair throat, chasing silver droplets of water, feeling Galadriel’s pulse beneath her tongue. Lower still, to press her mouth to her breasts, cold as marble but soft against her lips and teeth. Lúthien paused there, in the place just below what a gown might cover, to suck at that fine skin until it warmed and bruised the swirling pinks and purples of an orchid.

With the hands still caught in her hair, Galadriel urged her lower and Lúthien kissed her way down, over the smooth plains of her stomach, lingering at the well of her navel, while her right hand came up to press between Galadriel’s thighs.

Her outer lips were cold from the water but when Lúthien parted them and pressed in she found her warm as summer inside. Lúthien stroked once and then withdrew and brought her fingers to her lips that she might taste her. There were peaches that grew in the sun-dappled clearings above Menegroth, soft, furred skin and moist flesh and sweet-sharp juice, sticky upon Lúthien’s fingers and her lips, and she thought of them now.

“More than one way of living indeed,” said Galadriel cooly although, even had Lúthien not been able to feel how slick she was with arousal, she did not keep it from her face and voice any better than resentment.

“Although you did not ask, _I_ find worrying about death rather tedious when there is living to be done.” Lúthien pressed in again with two fingers ,while her thumb sought- _ah_. “I can respect another’s preference though and, if you wish it, I shall stop that we may philosophise.”

Galadriel, breath hissing between her teeth, did not seem to wish to debate matters of mortality any more than did Lúthien. But no more was she content to lie back and let Lúthien have her way.

Of the blood of Elu Thingol and of greater even than he, Lúthien was not easily overborne, but Galadriel in her passion was a force to be reckoned with and Lúthien writhed only a little as Galadriel leapt upon her and pinned her once again.

There was a brief pause as Lúthien’s bruised buttocks and Galadriel’s grazed knees made the argument that they ought to adjourn to a nearby patch of moss, and then Galadriel was upon her once again, hungry and searching.

Lúthien lay spread in the shadow of her hair as Galadriel crouched above her, golden tresses spilling forwards to hide her face and whisper against Lúthien’s skin.

Her hands were smooth but not entirely soft - her fingers were marked with the new calluses of a seamstress and her palms with the memories of sword and spear. Lúthien kissed them all, from her knuckles to the pale scars upon her fingertips. Two of those clever fingers she drew into her mouth and circled with her tongue, tasting salt and the mineral tang of the water. Galadriel’s free hand came to rest upon Lúthien’s breast and, sure but gentle, she rolled the nipple between her fingers, even as she lowered her head and closed her mouth about the other. She did not bite or pinch, not quite, but Lúthien could not help but be aware of the scrape of nails and teeth, sending pleasure rippling through her.

One long, muscled thigh pressed Lúthien’s legs apart and she rocked against it, and then against the palm that replaced it. Her own hand went questing again, through the tight-curled hair between Galadriel’s legs to press back inside her, winning a clench of muscle and a gasp of warm air against the wet skin of her breast.

The waterfall gurgled prettily, but not quite loudly enough to drown out their harsh breathing, the ringing of the bells in Lúthien’s ears, or the slick, filthy sounds as Galadriel spread her open and plunged two fingers deep inside her. Lúthien had time to wonder, briefly, who Galadriel had learnt _this_ from, and then those fingers pressed and twisted and Galadriel bit down upon her breast, and Lúthien decided that wondering anything, that forming coherent thought was a waste of time. Her toes curled, digging black divots in the green moss beneath her. It was still cold and damp, but she felt so warm she was surprised the water did not rise steaming from her skin.

It was like leaping once more into the pool; an exhilarating rush and then the dark breaking over her as her eyes clenched shut and her body locked, though not with cold. Galadriel moaned into her ear and caught Lúthien ‘s wrist, not letting her stop moving even as her limbs went slack and languid with release. It was not long that she lay in the dark, spread beneath the Noldorin girl, before she felt Galadriel shudder and clench about her fingers.

Lúthien drew them out and wiped them clean upon the moss, before coiling her arms about the other woman’s waist.

It was power that Galadriel had come to Doriath to find, and she would see this as power too. Indeed, there was something triumphant in her eyes as she raised herself upon one elbow to look down at Lúthien, all flushed and tangle-haired. A waste, Lúthien thought, to make this so much more and less than it was.

But hadn’t Lúthien known that from the start? And hadn’t she wanted Galadriel for precisely that bright, challenging flame?

Lúthien stretched and scratched an itch upon her calf. The sun was still high, she judged, and they would not be expected back in Menegroth for hours yet.

“There’s power in threes,” she said and drew Galadriel down again.


End file.
